20,000-year-old remnant exposed in melting permafrost

About 20,000 years ago, a young woolly rhino ran as usual in the icy region of northern Siberia. Something looking for food probably went fatally wrong for the young animal as it drowned in the Tirekhtyakh River or a nearby area.

Fast forward a few millennia and the tragic fate of the woolly rhino that day became a pathologist’s dream. Helped by the melting permafrost due to a tendency of rising temperatures, creatures that have long been extinct, such as the woolly rhino, are exposed and shed new light on unknown, prehistoric periods.

Permafrost is a permanently frozen layer of soil that has been frozen for a long time, sometimes several thousand years.

The old carcass was discovered by a local farmer in Yakutia, Siberia, in August 2020, about 15,000 years after the woolly rhino presumably became extinct. The fossil was found with a completely intact fur coat, hooves and internal organs, giving scientists an important puzzle piece about the anatomy, behavior and life of the creatures.

The video of the fossil excavation was shared online by The Siberian Times. As can be seen from the footage, paleontologists carefully considered preserving so much of the rhino’s structure. Their successes resulted in 80% of the sample remaining intact, a breakthrough attempt.

“The young rhino was between 3 and 4 years old and lived separately from his mother when he died, most likely by drowning,” paleontologist Valery Plotnikov told The Siberian Times.

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Plotnikov, who works with the Russian Academy of Sciences, added that the sex of the woolly rhino is still unknown and that radiocarbon analysis is needed to confirm the general timing of when the rhino probably lived.

Next to the rhino carcass was the horn of the young animal, according to Plotnikov, an extraordinary find because of how quickly the cartilage usually decomposes. According to the markers on the horn, more light is shed on how the species used it as food.

The frozen creature recently found is not the first woolly rhino discovered in the area, as another ice-preserved monster was excavated in 2015. The rhino, nicknamed Sasha, was the first woolly baby rhino ever discovered and presumably roamed. the region about 34,000 years ago.

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Like the rhino recently discovered, Sasha was found with a completely intact wool layer and she apparently drowned as well. Unlike the recent rhino, however, Sasha’s fur was strawberry blonde and did not have the front horn attached to the carcass.

Historically high temperatures in the usually icy region have buried fossils that are perfectly preserved, previously buried under thousands of years of thick ice. This past summer, shortly before the remains were found, record highs were recorded in towns around the Arctic Circle.

“Temperatures rose by 10 degrees Celsius (18 degrees Fahrenheit) last month in Siberia, where much of the Earth’s permafrost is as the world experienced its hottest May on record,” according to the European Union’s climate monitoring network.

AccuWeather meteorologist Maura Kelly wrote in June that the prolonged heat had melted the permafrost in northern Siberia.

“The record high temperatures in May followed a record-breaking start to 2020 in Russia,” she wrote in a story for AccuWeather.com at the time. “The temperature from January to April across the country was about 6 degrees Celsius (11 degrees Fahrenheit) above normal.”

Recently, the new woolly rhino fossil was transported to scientists for further testing thanks to newly built ice roads in Yakutia. In the years to come, the slowly declining ice layer will reveal even more frozen puzzle pieces, which will continually compose the jigsaw of our ancestors and generations of the previously hidden life.

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